home, children, friends, and a need for winter. The wild goose feels
it, too, and no length of domesticating can tame the wild desire to fly
when the frosts begin to fall; the woodchuck feels it; carry him to the
tropics and still he will sleep as though the snows of New England lay
deep in the mouth of his burrow. The partridge’s foot broadens at the
approach of winter into a snowshoe; the ermine’s fur turns snow-white.
Winter is in their bones; it is good for them; it is health, not
disease—with snowshoes provided and snow-colored fur.
Nature supplies her own remedies. Winter brings its own
cure,—snowshoes and snowy coats, short days and long nights, the
narrowed round, the widened view, the open fire, leisure, quiet, and
the companionship of your books, your children, your wife, your own
strange soul—here on the farm.
Where else does it come, bringing all of this? Where else are
conditions such that all weather is good weather? The weather a man
needs? Here he is planted like his trees; his roots are in the soil;
the changing seasons are his life. He feeds upon them; works with them;
rests in them; yields to them, and finds in their cycle more than the
sum of his physical needs.
A man lives quite without roots in a city, like some of the orchids,
hung up in the air; or oftener, like the mistletoe, rooted, but drawing
his life parasitically from some simpler, stronger, fresher life
planted far below him in the soil. There he cannot touch the earth and
feed upon life’s first sources. He knows little of any kind but bad
weather. Summer is hot, winter is nasty, spring and autumn scarcely are
at all, for they do not make him uncomfortable. The round year is four
changes of clothes—and a tank-sprinkled, snow-choked, smoke-clouded,
cobble-paved, wheel-wracked, street-scented, wire-lighted half-day,
half-night something, that is neither spring, summer, autumn, nor
winter.
A city is a sore on the face of Nature; not a dangerous, ugly sore,
necessarily, if one can get out of it often enough and far enough,
but a sore, nevertheless, that Nature will have nothing kindly to do
with. The snows that roof my sheds with Carrara, that robe my trees
with ermine, that spread close and warm over my mowing, that call out
the sleds and the sleigh-bells, fall into the city streets as mud, as
danger on the city roofs,—as a nuisance over the city’s length and
breadth, a nuisance to be hauled off and dumped into the harbor as fast
as shovels and carts can move it.
But you cannot dump your winter and send it off to sea. There is
no cure for winter in a tip-cart; no cure in the city. There is
consolation in the city, for there is plenty of company in the misery.
But company really means more of the misery. If life is to be endured,
if all that one can do with winter is to shovel it and suffer it, then
to the city for the winter, for there one’s share of the shoveling is
small, and the suffering there seems very evenly distributed.
Here on the farm is neither shoveling nor suffering, no quarrel
whatever with the season. Here you have nothing to do with its coming
or going further than making preparation to welcome it and to bid it
farewell. You slide, instead, with your boys; you do up the chores
early in the short twilight, pile the logs high by the blazing chimney
and—you remember that there is to be a lecture to-night by the man who
has said it all in his book; there is to be a concert, a reception,
a club dinner, in the city, sixteen blissful miles away,—and it
is snowing! You can go if you have to. But the soft tapping on the
window-panes grows faster, the voices at the corners of the house rise
higher, shriller. You look down at your slippers, poke up the fire,
settle a little deeper into the big chair, and beg Eve to go on with
the reading.
And she reads on—
Shut in from all the world without,
We sat the clean-winged hearth about,
Content to let the north wind roar
In baffled rage at pane and door,
While the red logs before us beat
The frost-line back with tropic heat;
And ever, when a louder blast
Shook beam and rafter as it passed,
The merrier up its roaring draught
The great throat of the chimney laughed.
* * * * *
And, for the winter fireside meet,
Between the andirons’ straddling feet,
The mug of cider simmered slow,
The apples sputtered in a row,
And, close at hand, the basket stood
With nuts from brown October’s wood.
But you will be snow-bound in the morning and cannot get to town?
Perhaps; but it happened so only twice to me in the long snowy winter
of 1904. So twice we read the poem, and twice we lived the poem, and
twice? yes, a thousand times, we were glad for a day at home that
wasn’t Sunday, for a whole long day to pop corn with the boys.
A farm, of all human habitations, is most of a home, and never so much
of a home as in the winter when the stock and the crops are housed,
when furrow and boundary fence are covered, when earth and sky conspire
to drive a man indoors and to keep him in,—where he needs to stay for
a while and be quiet.
No problem of city life is more serious than the problem of making in
the city a home. A habitation where you can have no garden, no barn,
no attic, no cellar, no chickens, no bees, no boys (we were allowed
_one_ boy by the janitor of our city flat), no fields, no sunset skies,
no snow-bound days, can hardly be a home. To live in the fifth flat,
at No. 6 West Seventh Street, is not to have a home. Pictures on the
walls, a fire in the grate, and a prayer in blending zephyrs over the
door for God to bless the place can scarcely make of No. 6 more than a
sum in arithmetic. There is no home environment about this fifth flat
at No. 6, just as there is none about cell No. 6, in the fifth tier of
the west corridor of the Tombs.
The idea, the concept, home, is a house set back from the road behind
a hedge of trees, a house with a yard, with flowers, chickens, and a
garden,—a country home. The songs of home are all of country homes:—
How dear to this heart are the scenes of my childhood
When fond recollection presents them to view:
* * * * *
The gutter, the lamp-post, the curb that ran by it,
And e’en the brass spigot that did for a well.—
Impossible! You cannot sing of No. 6, West Seventh, fifth flight up.
And what of a home that cannot be remembered as a song! It is not a
home, but only a floor over your head, a floor under your feet, a hole
in the wall of the street, a burrow into which you are dumped by a
hoisting machine. It is warm inside; Eve is with you, and the baby,
and your books. But you do not hear the patter of the rain upon the
roof, nor the murmur of the wind in the trees; you do not see the sun
go down beyond the wooded hills, nor ever feel the quiet of the stars.
You have no largeness round about you; you are the centre of nothing;
you have no garden, no harvest, no chores,—no home! There is not room
enough about a city flat for a home, nor chores enough in city life for
a living.
For a man’s life consisteth not in an abundance of things, but in the
particular kind and number of his chores. A chore is a fragment of real
life that is lived with the doing. All real living must be lived; it
cannot be bought or hired. And herein is another serious problem in
city life,—it is the tragedy of city life that it is so nearly all
lived for us. We hire Tom, Dick, and Harry to live it; we buy it of the
butcher, the baker, the candlestick-maker. It is not so here on the
farm; for here one has the full round of life’s chores, and here, on a
professor’s salary, one may do all the chores himself.
We may hire our praying and our thinking done for us and still live;
but not our chores. They are to the life of the spirit what breathing
and eating and sleeping are to the life of the body. Not to feed your
own horse is to miss the finest joy of having a horse,—the friendship
of the noble creature; not to “pick up” the eggs yourself, nor hoe your
own garden, nor play with your own boys! Why, what is the use of having
boys if you are never going to be “it” again, if you are not to be a
boy once more along with them!
There are some things, the making of our clothes, perhaps, that we must
hire done for us. But clothes are not primitive and essential; they are
accidental, an adjunct, a necessary adjunct, it may be, but belonging
to a different category from children, gardens, domestic animals, and a
domestic home. And yet, how much less cloth we should need, and what a
saving, too, of life’s selvage, could we return to the spinning-wheel
and loom as we go back to the farm and the daily chores!
She, harvest done, to char work did aspire,
Meat, drink, and twopence were her daily hire.
And who has not known the same aspiration? has not had a longing for
mere chores, and their ample compensation? It is such a reasonable,
restful, satisfying aspiration! Harvest done! Done the work and worry
of the day! Then the twilight, and the evening chores, and the soft
closing of the door! At dawn we shall go forth again until the evening;
but with a better spirit for our labor after the fine discipline of the
morning chores. The day should start and stop in our own selves; labor
should begin and come to an end in the responsibility of the wholesome,
homely round of our own chores.
Summer is gone, the harvest is done, and winter is passing on its
swiftest days. So swift, indeed, are the days that morning and evening
meet, bound up like a sheaf by the circle of the chores. For there is
never an end to the chores; never a time when they are all done; never
a day when the round of them is not to be done again. And herein lies
more of their virtue as a winter cure.
Life is not busier here than elsewhere; time is not swifter, but more
enjoyable, because so much of life is left unfinished and time is
thrown so much more into the future. There is no past on the farm; it
is all to come; no sure defeat, but always promise; no settled winter,
but always the signs of coming spring.
To-day is the first of January, snowy, brilliant, but dripping with the
sound of spring wherever the sun lies warm, and calling with the heart
of spring yonder where the crows are flocking. There is spring in the
talk of the chickadees outside my window, and in the cheerful bluster
of a red squirrel in the hickory. No bluebird has returned yet: spring
is not here, not quite, I hope, but it is coming, and so near that
I shall drop my pen and go out to the barn to put together some new
beehives, for I must have them ready for the spring. Winter! The winter
is almost gone. Why, it is barely a month since I brought my bees into
the cellar, and here I am taking them out again—in prospect.
The hives have just come from the factory “in the flat”: sawed, planed,
dovetailed, and matched,—a delightful set of big blocks,—ready to be
nailed together. You feel a bit mean, keeping them from the children.
But the oldest of the boys is only six, and he had a walking bear
for Christmas. Besides, when you were a _little_ boy you never had
many blocks, and never a walking bear. So you keep the hives. And how
suddenly the January day goes! You hammer on into the deepening dusk,
and the chickens go to roost without their supper. You would have
hammered on all night, but the hives ran out. Five hives won’t last
very long; and you sigh as they stand finished. You could wish them all
in pieces to do over again, so smooth the stock, so fragrant the piny
smell, so accurate and nice the parts from cover to bottom board!
Winter! with January started, and February two days short! It is all a
fiction. You had dreams of long evenings, of books and crackling fires,
and of days shut in. It still snows; there is something still left of
the nights, but not half enough, for the seed catalogues are already
beginning to arrive.
The snow lies a foot deep over the strawberry bed and the frozen soil
where the potatoes are to be. Yet the garden grows—on paper? No, not
on paper, but in your own eager soul. The joy of a garden is as real in
January as in June.
And so the winter goes. For if it is not the garden and the bees, it
is some of a thousand other chores that keep you busy and living past
the present,—and past the present is the spring.
I am watching for the phœbes to return to the shed,—they are my first
birds. I long to hear the shrill piping of the March frogs, to pick
a blue hepatica from beneath the pines; for these are some of the
things, besides cheaper rent, more room, more boys, fresh air, quiet,
and a cow, that one lives for here on the farm. But I am not waiting,
winter-sick, for I have stored the summer in attic and cellar; I am
already having my spring—in prospect; and as for the actual winter,
the snow-bound days are all too few for the real winter joys of this
simple, ample life, here in the quiet, among the neighbor fields.
[Illustration]
IV
The Nature-Student
I
I HAD made a nice piece of dissection, a pretty demonstration—for a
junior.
“You didn’t know a dog was put together so beautifully, did you?” said
the professor, frankly enjoying the sight of the marvelous system of
nerves laid bare by the knife. “Now, see here,” he went on, eyeing me
keenly, “doesn’t a revelation like that take all the moonshine about
the ‘beauties of nature’ clean out of you?”
I looked at the lifeless lump upon my table, and answered very
deliberately: “No, it doesn’t. That’s a fearful piece of mechanism. I
appreciate that. But what is any system of nerves or muscles—mere dead
dog—compared with the love and affection of the dog alive?”
The professor was trying to make a biologist out of me. He had worked
faithfully, but I had persisted in a very unscientific love for live
dog. Not that I didn’t enjoy comparative anatomy, for I did. The
problem of concrescence or differentiation in the cod’s egg also was
intensely interesting to me. And so was the sight and the suggestion
of the herring as they crowded up the run on their way to the spawning
pond. The professor had lost patience. I don’t blame him.
“Well,” he said, turning abruptly, “you had better quit. You’ll be only
a biological fifth wheel.”
I quit. Here on my table lies the scalpel. Since that day it has only
sharpened lead pencils.
Now a somewhat extensive acquaintance with scientific folk leads me
to believe that the attitude of my professor toward the out-of-doors
is not exceptional. The love for nature is all moonshine, all
maudlin sentiment. Even those like my professor, who have to do
with out-of-door life and conditions,—zoölogists, botanists,
geologists,—look upon naturalists, and others who love birds and
fields, as of a kind with those harmless but useless inanities who
collect tobacco tags, postage stamps, and picture postal cards.
Sentiment is not scientific.
I have a biological friend, a professor of zoölogy, who never saw a
woodchuck in the flesh. He would not know a woodchuck with the fur on
from a mongoose. Not until he had skinned it and set up the skeleton
could he pronounce it _Arctomys monax_ with certainty. Yes, he could
tell by the teeth. Dentition is a great thing. He could tell a white
pine (_strobus_) from a pitch pine (_rigida_) by just a cone and a
bundle of needles,—one has five, the other three, to the bundle. But
he wouldn’t recognize a columned aisle of the one from a Jersey barren
of the other. That is not the worst of it: he would not see even the
aisle or the barren,—only trees.
As we jogged along recently, on a soft midwinter day that followed a
day of freezing, my little three-year-old threw his nose into the air
and cried: “Oh, fader, I smell de pitch pines, de scraggly pines,—’ou
calls ’em Joisey pines!” And sure enough, around a double curve in the
road we came upon a single clump of the scraggly pitch pines. Our
drive had taken us through miles of the common white species.
Did you ever smell the pitch pines when they are thawing out? It is
quite as healthful, if not as scientific, to recognize them by their
resinous breath as by their needles per bundle.
I want this small boy some time to know the difference between these
needle bundles. But I want him to learn now, and to remember always,
that the hard days are sure to soften, and that then there oozes
from the scraggly pitch pines a balm, a piny, penetrating, purifying
balm,—a tonic to the lungs, a healing to the soul.
All foolishness? sentiment? moonshine?—this love for woods and fields,
this need I have for companionship with birds and trees, this longing
for the feel of grass and the smell of earth? When I told my biological
friend that these longings were real and vital, as vital as the highest
problems of the stars and the deepest questions of life, he pitied me,
but made no reply.
He sees clearly a difference between live and dead men, a difference
between the pleasure he gets from the society of his friends, and
the knowledge, interesting as it may be, which he obtains in a
dissecting-room. But he sees no such difference between live and dead
nature, nature in the fields and in the laboratory. Nature is all a
biological problem to him, not a quick thing,—a shape, a million
shapes, informed with spirit,—a voice of gladness, a mild and healing
sympathy, a companionable soul.
“But there you go!” he exclaims, “talking poetry again. Why don’t
you deal with facts? What do you mean by nature-study, love for the
out-of-doors, anyway!”
I do not mean a sixteen weeks’ course in zoölogy, or botany, or in
Wordsworth. I mean, rather, a gentle life course in getting acquainted
with the toads and stars that sing together, for most of us, just
within and above our own dooryards. It is a long life course in the
deep and beautiful things of living nature,—the nature we know so well
as a corpse. It is of necessity a somewhat unsystematized, incidental,
vacation-time course,—the more’s the pity. The results do not often
come as scientific discoveries. They are personal, rather; more after
the manner of revelations,—data that the professors have little faith
in. For the scientist cannot put an April dawn into a bottle, cannot
cabin a Hockomock marsh, nor cage a December storm in a laboratory. And
when, in such a place, did a scientist ever overturn a “wee bit heap o’
weeds an’ stibble”? Yet it is out of dawns and marshes and storms that
the revelations come; yes, and out of mice nests, too, if you love all
the out-of-doors, and chance to be ploughing late in the fall.
But there is the trouble with my professor. He never ploughs at all.
How can he understand and believe? And isn’t this the trouble with many
of our preacher poets, also? Some of them spend their summers in the
garden; but the true poet—and the naturalist—must stay later, and
they must plough, plough the very edge of winter, if they would turn up
what Burns did that November day in the field at Mossgiel.
How amazingly fortunate were the conditions of Burns’s life! What if he
had been professor of English literature at Edinburgh University? He
might have written a life of Milton in six volumes,—a monumental work,
but how unimportant compared with the lines “To a Mouse”!
We are going to live real life and write real poetry again,—when all
who want to live, who want to write, draw directly upon life’s first
sources. To live simply, and out of the soil! To live by one’s own
ploughing, and to write!
Instead, how do we live? How do I live? Nine months in the year by
talking bravely about books that I have not written. Between times I
live on the farm, hoe, and think, and write,—whenever the hoeing is
done. And where is my poem to a mouse?
Its silly wa’s the win’s are strewin!
With a whole farm o’ foggage green, and all the year before me, I am
not sure that I could build a single line of genuine poetry. But I am
certain that, in living close to the fields, we are close to the source
of true and great poetry, where each of us, at times, hears lines that
Burns and Wordsworth left unmeasured,—lines that we at least may
_live_ into song.
Now, I have done just what my biological friend knew I would do,—made
over my course of nature-study into a pleasant but idle waiting for
inspiration. I have frankly turned poet! No, not unless Gilbert White
and Jefferies, Thoreau, Burroughs, Gibson, Torrey, and Rowland Robinson
are poets. But they are poets. We all are,—even the biologist, with
half a chance,—and in some form we are all waiting for inspiration.
The nature-lover who lives with his fields and skies simply puts
himself in the way of the most and gentlest of such inspirations.
He may be ploughing when the spirit comes, or wandering, a mere boy,
along the silent shores of a lake, and hooting at the owls. You
remember the boy along the waters of Winander, how he would hoot at
the owls in the twilight, and they would call back to him across the
echoing lake? And when there would come a pause of baffling silence,
Then, sometimes, in that silence, while he hung
Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprise
Has carried far into his heart the voice
Of mountain-torrents; or the visible scene
Would enter unawares into his mind
With all its solemn imagery.
That is an inspiration, the kind of experience one has in living with
the out-of-doors. It doesn’t come from books, from laboratories, not
even from an occasional tramp afield. It is out of companionship with
nature that it comes; not often, perhaps, to any one, nor only to poets
who write. I have had such experiences, such moments of quiet insight
and uplift, while in the very narrowest of the paths of the woods.
It was in the latter end of December, upon a gloomy day that was heavy
with the oppression of a coming storm. In the heart of the maple swamp
all was still and cold and dead. Suddenly, as out of a tomb, I heard
the small, thin cry of a tiny tree frog. And how small and thin it
sounded in the vast silences of that winter swamp! And yet how clear
and ringing! A thrill of life tingling out through the numb, nerveless
body of the woods that has ever since made a dead day for me impossible.
That was an inspiration. I learned something, something deep and
beautiful. Had I been Burns or Wordsworth I should have written a poem
to Hyla. All prose as I am, I was, nevertheless, so quickened by that
brave little voice as to write:—
The fields are bleak, the forests bare,
The swirling snowflakes fall
About the trees a winding-sheet,
Across the fields a pall.
A wide, dead waste, and leaden sky,
Wild winds, and dark and cold!
The river’s tongue is frozen thick,
With life’s sweet tale half told.
Dead! Ah, no! the white fields sleep,
The frozen rivers flow;
And summer’s myriad seed-hearts beat
Within this breast of snow.
With spring’s first green the holly glows
And flame of autumn late,—
The embers of the summer warm
In winter’s roaring grate.
The thrush’s song is silent now,
The rill no longer sings,
But loud and long the strong winds strike
Ten million singing strings.
O’er mountains high, o’er prairies far,
Hark! the wild pæan’s roll!
The lyre is strung ’twixt ocean shores
And swept from pole to pole!
My meeting with that frog in the dead of winter was no trifling
experience, nor one that the biologist ought to fail to understand. Had
I been a poet, that meeting would have been of consequence to all the
world; as I was, however, it meant something only to me,—a new point
of view, an inspiration,—a beautiful poem that I cannot write.
This attitude of the nature-lover, because it is contemplative and
poetical, is not therefore mystical or purely sentimental. Hooting at
the owls and hearing things in baffling silences may not be scientific.
Neither is it unscientific. The attitude of the boy beside the starlit
lake is not that of Charlie, the man who helps me occasionally on the
farm.
We were clearing up a bit of mucky meadow recently when we found a
stone just above the surface that was too large for the horse to haul
out. We decided to bury it.
Charlie took the shovel and mined away under the rock until he struck a
layer of rather hard sandstone. He picked a while at this, then stopped
a while; picked again, rather feebly, then stopped and began to think
about it. It was hard work,—the thinking, I mean, harder than the
picking,—but Charlie, however unscientific, is an honest workman, so
he thought it through.
“Well,” he said finally, “‘t ain’t no use, nohow. You can’t keep it
down. You bury the darned thing, and it’ll come right up. I suppose it
grows. Of course it does. It must. Everything grows.”